HE

loss of power & privilege of which they were deprived by the last General Election (loss & deprived overlap ; that power & privilege is not the antecedent of which is proved by the absence of the before power)./The rather heavy expense of founding it could have been more usefully spent in other ways (spend money; incur expense)./Hitherto the only way of tackling the evil was by means of prohibiting the exportation from certain places (way & means overlap; the only way of tackling was to prohibit; it could only be tackled by means of)./With the one exception of Sir Alfred Lyall, who chequers praise with somewhat tentative criticism, all these tributes are naturally eulogistic (gap; Sir Alfred is not a tribute).

Certain words seem to lend themselves especially to this sort of haziness, as AGO (It is five years ago since I saw him); REASON with BECAUSE (The only reason his wages have not been higher is because-i.c. that the profits of the industry have been miserably low), or with due (The reasons of his success were due not only to .); the illogical Too (We need not attach too much importance to. .); PREFERABLE with more (the former alternative being, in our view, on every ground the more preferable); BUT with superfluous negatives (Who knows but what this memorial exhibition may not prove the starting point?); THAT conj. with questions or commands (Crises arise so rapidly in these days that who can say what a few years may bring forth ?/Your correspondent suggests that if we lend money let us send it to. .); REMAIN with continue (And yet through it all I continue to remain cheerful); SEEM with appear (These conclusions, it seems to me, appear to be reached naturally).

..

Additional examples will be found under the words referred to by being printed in small capitals.

he. In spite of the frequency with which we all claim, by quoting The Jackdaw of Rheims, to know the

·

grammar of he & him, an illegitimate him occasionally appears even in less colloquial placings than That's him'; thus: It might have been him & not President Wilson who said the other day that.. The tendency to use he where him is required is, however, much commoner in print. The mistake occurs when the pronoun is to stand in some out-of-theway or emphatic position; it looks as if writers, pulled up for a moment by the unusual, hastily muttered to themselves Regardless of grammar, they all cried "That 's him!"', & thanked God they had remembered to put he' :-The bell will be always rung by he who has the longest purse & the strongest arm./The distinction between the man who gives with conviction & he who is simply buying a title./And the severance then followed four years later by the creation of yet another Secretary of State, & he for India./One of its most notable achievements was the virtual

was

warning off' Newmarket Heath, though not in so many words, of a Prince of Wales, he who was afterwards George the Fourth./The character of Bismarck is of an intrinsic greatness & completeness, which enables the spectator, even he who is most repelled by the results of Bismarck's appearance in the world, to...

headmaster, headmistress, headquarters. Write each as a single unhyphened word, the accent being on the second element; see Hy

PHENS.

heap. There are heaps more to say, but I must not tax your space further. Are, or is? see NUMBER.

hearths. For pronunciation sec TH & DH.

heave. Past & p.p. heaved or hove. Hebe. See SOBRIQUETS. hebraism, hebraist, hebraize, are the usual forms, not hebrewism &c.

Hebrew, Israelite, Jew, Semite. Persons to whom all these words are applicable are thought of by the modern Englishman as Jews; if he

HECATOMB

uses in speech one of the other words instead of Jew, it is for some reason, known or possibly unknown to himself. He may be deliberately avoiding Jew for whichever of the others he first thinks of, & that either at the bidding of ELEGANT VARIATION or NOVELTY-HUNTING or facetiousness, or for the better reason that Jew has certain traditional implications (as usury, anti-Christianity) that are unsuited to the context. Or on the other hand he may be not avoiding Jew, but choosing one rather than another of the alternatives for itself: Hebrew suggests the pastoral & patriarchal, or again the possession of a language & a literature; Israelite, the Chosen People & the theocracy, & him in whom was no guile; Semite, the failure of most modern nations to assimilate their Jews. The fact remains that Jew is the current word, & that if we mean to substitute another for it, it is well to know why we do so. A remark or two of the OED bearing on the distinctions may be added :-(On Hebrew) Historically, the term is usually applied to the early Israelites; in modern use it avoids the religious & other associations often attaching to Jew'; (on Jew) Applied comparatively rarely to the ancient nation before the Exile, but the commonest name for contemporary or modern representatives of the race; almost always connoting their religion & other characteristics which distinguish them from the people among whom they live, & thus often opposed to Christian, & (esp. in early use) expressing a more or less opprobrious sense'.

hecatomb. Pronounce -ŏm.

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hectic. For a h. moment./M. Coué was taken up by some of our h. papers, & then dropped because he did not do what he never professed to do./ They have got pretty well used to the h. undulations of the mark. The sudden blossoming of h. into a VOGUE-WORD, meaning excited, rap

turous, intense, impassioned, wild, uncontrolled, & the like, is very singular. The OED (1901) shows hardly a trace of it, & explains its one quotation of the kind ( vehement & h. feeling ') as an allusion to the h. flush-no doubt rightly. Now a h. flush is one that is accounted for not, like other flushes, by exceptional & temporary vigour or emotion, but by the habit (Greek Eis) of body called consumption. The nearest parallel to this queer development seems to be the use of CHRONIC for severe, the only difference being that while that is confined to the entirely uneducated this has had the luck to capture the journalists.

hecto-. See CENTI-.

hedonist, Cyrenaic, epicurean, utilitarian. The first (literally, adherent of pleasure) is a general name for the follower of any philosophy, or any system of ethics, in which the end or the summum bonum or highest good is stated as (in whatever sense) pleasure.

The Cyrenaic (i.e. follower of Aristippus of Cyrene) is the hedonist in its natural acceptation-the pleasure-seeker who only differs from the ordinary voluptuary by being aware, as a philosopher, that the mental & moral pleasures are pleasanter than those of the body.

The epicurean (or follower of Epicurus), bad as his popular reputation is, rises above the Cyrenaic by identifying pleasure, which remains nominally his summum bonum, with the practice of virtue.

The utilitarian, by a still more surprising development, while he remains faithful to pleasure, understands by it not his own, but that of mankind-the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

It will be seen that the hedonist umbrella is a broad one, covering very different persons. Both the epicurean & the utilitarian have suffered some wrong in popular usage; it has been generally ignored that for Epicurus pleasure consisted

HEGEMONY

in the practice of virtue, & the utilitarian is unjustly supposed (on the foolish ground that what is useful is not beautiful & that beauty is of no use) to rate the steamroller higher than Paradise Lost. It may be worth while to quote the OED's statement of the distinctive doctrines of Epicurus:-1. That the highest good is pleasure, which he identified with the practice of virtue. 2. That the gods do not concern themselves at all with men's affairs. 3. That the external world resulted from a fortuitous

atoms'.

hegemony.

concourse

of

see

The pronunciation hege'moni is recommended; GREEK G. hegira. Ir'a).

Pronounce hě'jira (not

heir. 1. For h. of all the ages see HACKNEYED PHRASES.

2. H. apparent)(h. presumptive. These phrases are often used, when there is no occasion for either & heir alone would suffice, merely because they sound imposing & seem to imply familiarity with legal terms. And those who use them for such reasons sometimes give themselves away as either supposing them to be equivalent or not knowing which is which. Thus: By the tragedy of the death of the Crown Prince Rudolph in 1889 the Archduke Ferdinand became the Heir Apparent to the throne. Rudolph, it is true, was heir apparent; but by his death no-one could become h. a. except his child or younger brother (whereas Ferdinand was his cousin), since the Emperor might yet conceivably have a son who would displace anyone else. An h. a. is one whose title is indefeasible by any possible birth; an h. p. is one who will lose his position if an h. a. is born. Mistakes are no doubt due to the double sense of the word apparent. Its old sense, retained in h. a., & still possible elsewhere in literary use, but avoided for fear of confusion with the other & prevailing sense, is manifest or

sense is almost the same as that of seeming, though with slightly less implication that the appearance & the reality are different; apparent in this sense means much the same as presumptive, but in the other something very different; hence the

error.

heliotrope. Pronounce hē-.

helix. Pl. helices, pronounce ⚫sēz. hellebore. Pronounce he'libor. Hellene, Hellenic. The function of these words in English, beside Greek, is not easy to define; but the use of them is certainly increasing. They were formerly scholars' words, little used except by historians, & by persons concerned not so much with Greeks in themselves as with the effects of Greek culture on the development of civilization in the world. With the modern spread of education, the words have been popularized in such connexions; at the same time the national aspirations of Greek irredentists have called newspaper attention to panHellenism & to the name by which the Greeks & their king call themselves; so that the proportion of people to whom Greek means something, & Hellene & Hellenic nothing, is smaller than it was. Nevertheless, Greek remains the English word, into whose place the Greek words should not be thrust without special justification.

hello. See HALLOO. helmet makes -eted; see -T-, -TT-. help, n. For lady h., see GENTEEL

ISMS.

help, v. Than, & as, one can help, Don't sneeze more than you can help, Sneeze as little as you can h., are perhaps to be classed as STURDY INDEFENSIBLES. Those who refrain from the indefensible however sturdy it may be have no difficulty in correcting: Don't sneeze more than you must, Sneeze as little as you can or may. Out of Don't sneeze if you can help it is illogically developed Don't sneeze more than you can help, which

HELPMATE

would be logical, though not attractive, if cannot were written for can. And out of Don't sneeze more than you can help by a further blunder comes Sneeze as little as you can help; a further blunder, because there is not a mere omission of a negative- you cannot help' does not mend the matter-, but a failure to see that can without help is exactly what is wanted: the full form would be Sneeze as little as you can sneeze little, not as you either can, or cannot, keep from sneezing. The OED, which stigmatizes the idiom as erroneous', quotes Newman for it :-Your name shall occur again as little as I can help, in the course of these pages (where as little as may be would have done, or, more clumsily, if the I is wanted, as little as I can let it)

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helpmate)(helpmeet. The OED's remark on the latter is :-A compound absurdly formed by taking the two words help meet in Gen. ii. 18, 20 (an help meet for him ', i. e. a help suitable for him) as one word.

hem-. See HAEM-, HAEMORRHAGE, & Æ, C.

hemiplegia. For pronunciation see GREEK G.

hemistich. Pronounce -k.

hempen. See -EN ADJECTIVES. hendecasyllable, hendiadys, hephthemimeral. See TECHNICAL TERMS. her. 1. Case. For questions of her & she, see SHE, & cf. HE.

2. For questions of her & hers (e. g. Her & his tasks differ), see ABSOLUTE

POSSESSIVES.

3. For her & she in irresolute or illegitimate personifications (c.g. The United States has given another proof of its determination to uphold her neutrality./Danish sympathy is writ large over all her newspapers), sce PERSONIFICATION.

Herculean. Pronounce herkū ́lian. The normal sound of words in -ean is with the -e- accented & long; so Pericle'an, Cythere'an, Sophoclē'an, Medice'an, Tacitē'an, pygmē'an, &

scores of others. Of words that vacillate between this sound & that given by shifting the accent back & making the -e- equivalent to I, as in Herculean, most develop a second spelling to suit; so Caesarean or Caesarian, cyclopean or -pian, Aristotelean or lian. Herculean, like protean, changes its sound without a change of spelling; & many people in consequence doubt how the words should be said. The sound herkū’lian is not a modern blunder to be avoided, but is estab

lished by long use. In the only three verse quotations given by the OED, -ē'an is twice impossible, & once unlikely :—

Robust but not Herculean-to the sight

No giant frame sets forth his com-
mon height.-Byron
Let mine out-woe me; mine 's
Hurculean woe.-Marston

So rose the Danite strong, Herculean Samson, from the harlotlap

Of Philistean Dalilah.-Milton

heredity. The word is now used, by good writers, only in the biological sense, i.e. the tendency of like to beget like. The extract below, where it has been substituted for descent solely because descendant is to follow, illustrates well what happens when zeal for ELEGANT VARIATION is not tempered by discretion :-The Agha Khan

is unique because of his heredity-he is a lineal descendant of the Prophet Mohammed-though he is more noteworthy because of his being the leader of the neo-Moslems.

heriot. For synonymy see tax. heritrix. For pl. see -TRIX.

hermit. For the Hermit Kingdom see SOBRIQUETS.

hero. Pl. -oes; see -o(E)S 1. heroic (of metres). See TECHNICAL

TERMS.

herr. See MYNHEER.

herring. For the h.-pond, see WORN

OUT HUMOUR.

hers. See ABSOLUTE POSSESSIVES.

HESITANCE

hesitance, hesitancy, hesitation. The last has almost driven out the others; -ce may be regarded as obsolete; but -cy is still occasionally convenient when what is to be expressed is not the act or fact of hesitating, but the tendency to do so. Two examples from the OED will illustrate :-She rejected it without hesitation./That perpetual hesitancy which belongs to people whose intelligence & temperament are at variance.

heteroclite. See TECHNICAL TERMS. hew. P.p. usu. hewn, sometimes hewed.

hexameter. See TECHNICAL TERMS. hiatus. See TECHNICAL TERMS. Pl. -uses, see -US, & LATIN PLURALS. Hibernian differs from Irish(man) as GALLIC from French, & is of the nature of POLYSYLLABIC HUMOUR. hibernice, -cè. See LATINE.

hiccup makes -uping, -uped; see -P-, -PP-. The spelling -ough is a perversion of popular etymology, & should be abandoned as a mere error '-OED.

hide, vb. P.p. hidden or hid, the latter still not uncommon. hie makes hieing; see Mute e. hierarchic(al). The long form is

the commoner. highbrow. See MUGWUMP. highly. 1. It should be remembered that high is an adv. as well as highly, & better in many contexts; e.g., It is best to pay your men high; High-placed officials; sec UNIDIOMATIC-LY. 2. Though highly in the sense to a high degree is often unobjectionable (a_highly_contentious question; highly farmed land), it has acquired, when used with adjectives of commendation, a patronizing taint (a highly entertaining performance) like distinctly, & is best avoided in such connexions.

Highness. For pronouns Your H. &c., see MAJESTY.

after

hight. See WORN-OUT HUmour. hillo(a). See Halloo.

him. See HE.

historic(al). The DIFFERENTIATION between the two forms has reached the stage at which it may fairly be said that the use of one in a sense now generally expressed by the other is a definite backsliding. The ordinary word is historical; historic means memorable, or assured of a place in history; historical should not be substituted for it in that sense; the only other function retained by historic is in the grammarians' technical terms historic tenses, moods, sequence, present, &c., in which it preserves the notion appropriate to narration of the past of which it has been in general use robbed by historical.

historicity. The earliest OED example of this ugly word is dated 1880; but, being effective in imparting a learned air to statements that are to impress the unlearned, it has had a rapid success, & is now com